Here’s what Ancient Aliens has been teaching us over the past five seasons:

The aliens do not come from another planet but rather from another dimension outside of space and time.

They have complete knowledge of the past, present, and future.

They can communicate with humans through dreams, visions, and psychic powers.

They will ferry the souls of the worthy to their dimension.

They and the souls of the worthy dead will live on in immortal bliss.

Now, I don’t know about you, but it sounds to me like these “aliens” are not “flesh and blood extraterrestrials” but rather pagan gods. They have no characteristics that distinguish them from the pagan gods, not even their UFOs, which are nothing more that the chariots that convey Thor and Helios and their ilk. Specifically, the vision of the aliens put forward by the ancient astronaut “theorists” is exactly that of Helena Blavatsky and Theosophy, where the aliens are spirit beings who bestow knowledge and boons on humanity and can speak through psychic communication.

It is the spirit of Blavatsky that hangs over Ancient Aliens S05E07 “Prophets and Prophecies,” and I would like to seriously propose that the “ancient astronaut theory” as presented on Ancient Aliens has become a revised Theosophy, a neo-pagan religion—a type of polytheism where every religion is right because all gods are real. This gradual transition from pseudoscience to out-and-out religion seems to be reflected even in the titles given to the show’s episodes. Have you noticed that Ancient Aliens has largely dropped the title formula it’s used for five years? Most episodes were titled “Aliens and [insert subject],” but the “Aliens…” part has faded away. Tonight’s episode is part of that new formula, simply called “Prophets and Prophecies.” I’m not sure whether this is a concession to the tiresomely repetitive nature of the show, or just an attempt to hide the fact that season five has been recycling material quite heavily from earlier seasons. This episode’s final quarter is recycled nearly verbatim from S05E05, about Einstein. Tonight’s title card is different from the past few as well; it’s green and features what seem to be Mesopotamian carvings. At any rate, I have an epistemological problem with this episode, one derived from its confusion between science and religion. The conceit seems to be that some humans have knowledge of the future, which implies a deterministic cosmos at odds with the spiritual fantasy the program has been putting forward recently. I don’t really see how we can have a spiritual dimension operating alongside our own but also a material cosmos that would be necessary for predicting the future. For aliens to be able to predict the future scientifically, they would need perfect knowledge of every subatomic particle in the universe, in a universe that operates on strict laws of causation. But if the aliens come from another dimension, how would this irruption of influence from other realms impact the material cosmos? It also doesn’t help that the show uses “prophet” in two different ways without distinguishing between them: as anyone who delivers a message on behalf of the gods, and someone possessed by a deity and controlled by that god. We begin by discussing Moses and other prophets of Judeo-Christian society, but I’m not sure that either Jews or Christians would agree with the assertion that Jesus was a prophet of God. (Muslims believe this, however.) Some experts on religion explain what prophets were in Jewish society, and then their insights are tossed overboard so Philip Coppens can tell us that “entities,” his famous “non-human intelligence,” are behind prophecies. It’s clear that he imagines these beings as trans-dimensional, godlike creatures, indistinguishable in any practical way from pagan gods. David Childress agrees that the aliens warned ancient people of natural disasters by pretending to be gods. If true, of course, Ancient Aliens is telling its viewers, most of whom come from Judeo-Christian backgrounds, that they are worshipping aliens. I’m sure Muslims (who consider Moses a prophet of Allah) are happy to hear that their religion is a false cult of alien-worship. Giorgio Tsoukalos says he is “fascinated” by the Burning Bush because it speaks to Moses, suggesting that it is a communication device. From this, we hear of Exodus 13:21-22, in which the pillar of cloud and fire accompanied the Israelites, which Tsoukalos tells us is a type of spacecraft. I’m not sure I understand how clouds are the same as a ship, though they make a good effort at trying to tell us that we should focus on the “pillar” rather than the “cloud” to get the UFO shape out of the description. However, the show’s talking heads are reduced to suggesting that the ship was “shiny” and “brightly lit” to explain why it would have a “halo” (reflected sunlight) around it to make it look like a cloud during the day. So, Moses goes up Mount Sinai to speak with God, who is of course an alien, returning with the Ten Commandments. Nick Redfern tells us that this is exactly like the “contactee experience” of today, pretending that modern UFO abduction experiences are both real and independent of the cultural framework of our society. The moral messages brought back by “abductees” over the past fifty years are general-issue social-liberal bromides about New Age niceness. It derives from the Judeo-Christian teachings that Redfern wants us to see as inspired by a larger level of alien influence, rather than a straightforward influence of Christianity on the beliefs of the abducted. Of course there has never been any conclusive evidence that anyone has ever been abducted. Next up we have Elijah, the prophet who was translated to heaven in a whirlwind, in the fiery chariot of God. Most of us would see this as a story, probably analogous to the fiery chariot of the sun in Near Eastern and Indo-European myths (a widespread symbol of the sun and thus of heaven), but Ancient Aliens wants us to read this a “spinning beam” (a tractor beam) from a UFO. Tsoukalos says that the fiery chariot is an interpolation and the original story mentioned only a fiery furnace, which Nick Redfern calls a jet engine. I’m not sure what he’s talking about since there is no older version of the Elijah story than that given in Kings, and the “fiery furnace” is not part of the Elijah story but rather is found in Daniel 3:14-29. Instead, Tsoukalos seems to be misunderstanding scholarly debate about the Hebrew text of 2 Kings 2:11 versus the popular understanding of it. This is a bit confusing, but the simple version is this: In the Hebrew text (and the English translations), Elijah and Elisha are separated by “a chariot of fire, and horses of fire” and then the whirlwind takes Elijah up to heaven. These are distinct events; further, the Hebrew does not specify that the chariot and horses were connected. Scholars also debated whether the Hebrew specifies that Elijah entered heaven or merely was carried off in the direction of heaven by the whirlwind, as well as whether the Hebrew word for “carried off” connotes travel or the extinguishing of life. Later writers conflated the horses, the chariots, and the whirlwind and depicted Elijah as riding a chariot to heaven. Thus, Tsoukalos seems to be badly paraphrasing material contained in the John Peter Lange’s Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (1873) and similar early critical texts. After this, we recount the story of Joseph Smith, the Mormon founder who supposedly discovered golden tablets on the advice of the angel Moroni, who the ancient astronaut pundits feel is an alien. We here a blunt assertion that Moroni was an extraterrestrial, but let’s be frank: Joseph Smith made up Mormonism, fabricated the Book of Mormon, and never met an alien. In fact, Smith couldn’t even decide how many aliens he met, what they looked like, or what their names were. Sometimes it is one angel, sometimes two; the angel’s name changes more than once in various texts, and sometimes the angel(s) aren’t named at all. Smith’s accounts are so muddled and conflicted that it becomes obvious they are not real events but either intentional fabrications or fantasies. Following Mormonism, we turn to Buddhism to no great effect, and Jason Martell tells us that there are other dimensions where the aliens live. (They’re no longer space beings, as noted.) But this is what bothers me: How could you predict the future in a cosmos where cause and effect cannot be mechanistically determined due to the random influx of other dimensions that (according to ancient astronaut theorists) operate under other physical laws? To predict the future well, one must deduce effects from causes, requiring a near-perfect knowledge of every subatomic particle in the universe, and this in turn requires a cosmos operating without “supernatural” forces. The only other option is to accept a universe filled with magic, but this would mean that the trans-dimensional beings aren’t distinguishable in any real sense from the gods they are meant to replace: which means that the ancient astronaut theory collapses in on itself, and the old stories become literally true as reports of actual gods! Polytheism! This epistemological conundrum makes my head hurt, and I wonder why it occurs to no one that many of these stories are (a) fiction, (b) unoriginal, and (c) dependent upon or related to other stories that are also claimed as independent verification of ancient astronauts. As we pass the halfway point, we travel to Persepolis, the ancient capital of Persia, to review (again!!!) the picture of Ahura Mazda in a winged disc, supposedly a picture of a UFO. I’ve written of this before and have no interest in rehashing it. We hear that Zoroaster (called Zarathustra here) met Ahura Mazda atop a cloud-covered mountain; supposedly this another alien encounter, but it’s actually not a piece of mythology but rather literature, the framing device of the Zend-Avesta, one of the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, but one composed of texts written over many centuries. In the book, Zoroaster is sitting on a mountain praying to Ahura Mazda when the god speaks to him. The book is clearly meant as a lesson plan to give divine sanction to Zoroaster’s teaching, and there is no serious effort to paint the framing story as history. So far as I can tell, there is no indication that the mountaintop of Ushidarena was covered in cloud for the entirety of the thirty years (!) Zoroaster spent atop it communing with Ahura Mazda. After this, we get the Oracle of Delphi, who channeled Apollo. The pundits seem confused about the Oracle and how to make it into an alien since the Pythia wasn’t specifically an alien, nor did she claim to meet one in person. We get some mainstream opinions about oracles as part of Greek culture, and the show makes a noble effort to try to attribute accuracy to the Oracle’s prophecies, none of which was ever recorded prior to the event it described. (Like every oracle, its predictions were ambiguous and could be interpreted to agree with any outcome.) David Childress tells us that Apollo was an extraterrestrial (which was the plot of a Star Trek episode), and Tsoukalos tells us that humans are Apollo’s “pet project.” But no one explains how aliens got into the Pythia’s head when she was prophesying to control her body. We simply pretend this further epistemological problem doesn’t exist. She was simply “in contact” with Apollo—in her head!—through some unknown, maybe magical, means. And that makes Apollo not a god how? I think this is still more evidence that ancient alien pundits are pagan polytheists. Do I really need to discuss Nostradamus, and the show next does? Philip Coppens says Nostradamus could “access information not available” to his contemporaries, but the show goes overboard to present Nostradamus as an accurate prophet of the future with “uncanny” knowledge, despite the fact that his “prophecies” are ambiguous quatrains written in a mixture of languages that can be well-explained as references to medieval and contemporary events familiar to Nostradamus. At any rate, the alleged prophecies can only be “understood” in retrospect. Some science-like mumbo jumbo related to string theory is used to explain how Nostradamus could channel information from the invisible dimensions, but we go back to the Akashic Record again, which I’ve explained in great detail simply does not exist. It is an imaginary construction of Theosophy, and calling it the “zero point field” doesn’t make it any more real. No one, however, seems troubled by the idea that if these prophecies are true and there is a cosmic “well of knowledge” telling all that will be that this means that free will is an illusion, that the cosmos moves inexorably from cause to effect… Nor does anyone pause to think how the aliens are able to reason from cause to effect to accurately forecast the future thousands of years ahead of time. We can’t even predict tomorrow’s weather. Apparently the aliens are just magic… but if they’re magic, then they are contravening the mechanistic universe required to make the prediction! Oh, fuck this. Nobody cares. In its last quarter, the show simply moves ahead to summarize the Albert Einstein material they already did an hour abouttwo episodes back, including the claim that his mind was receiving ideas from aliens, specifically “in [his] bedroom.” Did they think we wouldn’t notice? How stupid do they think their viewers are? If they care so little that they’re just assembling episodes out of spare parts, why shouldn’t I simply recycle my reviews? Maybe this is the aliens’ secret prophetic goal: To get me to stop reviewing the show by boring me to death. The fact that Einstein supposedly enjoyed Blavatsky’s 1877 Isis Unveiled is meant to tell us that Einstein was a mystic who “received” the theory of relativity from psychic connections to Theosophy’s ascended masters (the aliens). He is alleged to have kept copy on his desk, but this detail appears in no biography of Einstein, no photographs of his desk, and is almost certainly apocryphal—reverse engineered from Theosophy’s own documented obsession with Einstein’s relativity as proof of their slipshod cosmos. Congratulations, Blavastsky. You win. I give up. You made up all this crap about aliens, and now Ancient Aliens really thinks you were the prophet you always claimed to be. But I still get one point on you: Ancient Aliens’ producers are so stupid or illiterate they don’t even realize you wrote about ancient aliens (I’m sure they can’t get through your doorstop-sized books), so they haven’t managed to do an hour on you. Yet. We conclude by summarizing parts of the Einstein episode where Steve Jobs and other inventors are called prophets and thus alien contactees, and we return to the idea that humans are stupid, ignorant buffoons before the alien overlords. In fact, Childress says “we’re like their children,” and proves finally that ancient astronaut writers actually are looking for a powerful sky daddy, the same as creationists, but with a scientific gloss. This is just religious fundamentalism under another name, a neo-pagan revised Theosophy too cynical or stupid to recognize its roots.

I don't doubt that Einstein read and (or skimmed) enjoyed Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. Like you and I, Einstein enjoyed fringe theory, and he was a nice man.

Velikovskians like to point out that, when Einstein died, he had a copy of V's Earth In Upheaval open on his desk. V tried to get Einstein's attention for years. At one point, E told him to go away and stop writing him. However, after V moved to Princeton and introduced his self, Einstein took a liking to him. He enjoyed speaking German with someone from a pre-WWI generation. He read v's books and politely critiqued them, but in private he admitted they were pure bunk. But he liked Velikovsky.

When Hapgood sent him his polar shift theory, Einstein was not only polite, he encouraged H. H used E's letters as prefaces to his books based on the vast credibility of E. But, as I said, E liked these ideas and he was a very nice man. He also was a theoretical physicist and not a geologist, or credible in any other historical science.

Velikovski and his followers also confuses the myths about the Milky Way and distorts these to count for the planets. Google "saturn myth delusion" and read about these confusions.

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terry the censor

2/9/2013 03:59:39 pm

Whew! This episode got to you, Jason!

Do you think the producers are indeed lazy or have they just run through all the AA material and are forced to recycle?

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Jim

2/9/2013 07:04:40 pm

...they are recycling material because they have nothing new because they are too lazy to research new ideas so they are recycling material because they have nothing new because they are too lazy to research new ideas so they...

Actually, it didn't get to me. I just got bored trying to think of something new to say about old material so I tried turning it into an essay on deeper themes. It was more to keep myself awake while watching this terrible program.

Quote; "Now, I don’t know about you, but it sounds to me like these “aliens” are not “flesh and blood extraterrestrials” but rather pagan gods".
AD: You’re quite right in this. And when we transfer the "pagan gods" and goddesses of course, and interpret these in a modern way just as "different creative non personal cosmic forces" that creates everything, including us humans, then we better can understand how we humans can communicate with these creative forces in cosmos.
It all deals with having a flair for the symbolic language and connecting the right myths to the right celestial creative forces and objects. As for instants reading the Myths of Creation and connect these to the creation of our Milky Way.

I had some troubles posting my comment. Please remove the last 2 replies to John J. McCay.

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Thane

2/10/2013 07:21:29 am

I think part of the problem the AAT's are having is that science has advanced and there is still no objective evidence of ancient aliens from *this* dimension or reality found. So, to solve that problem, they gravitate to and embrace a more mystical and esoteric explanation.

Like any good con, you have to make it plausible enough but not easy to research to prove or disprove.

It also critical to the AATs to confuse science and religion. Religion relies on subjective faith, not objective evidence...and, as we know, objective truth is the enemy of ancient alien theories.

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Shawn Flynn

2/10/2013 07:26:32 pm

Me thinks the talking heads of AA want in on some of that sweet, sweet Scientology money.

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Pamela

2/10/2013 07:44:27 pm

As is always the case, I thoroughly enjoyed your review of Ancient Idiots--I mean Aliens. Yes, Aliens. But this? "Oh, fuck this." BEST LAUGH I'VE HAD ALL WEEK. It perfectly describes my attitude at about the same point when I watched the show. Sometimes I worry that the crazy is contagious. Mainly because I argue with the television when watching AA and its new cousin, America Unearthed. My dogs look at me like I'm insane. *smile*

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Alex

2/10/2013 09:56:55 pm

I always enjoy your reviews, thanks!

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Christopher Randolph

2/11/2013 04:10:49 pm

Provocative post.

Interestingly I could see Islam of the three usual suspect monotheistic religions running with the alien thing more than the others.

For one thing the Quran appears to specify (Sura 42) that Earth is not the only planet with life, rather that Allah scattered life through 'the heavens' and would be capable of calling all life to one place. As I wrote once doing some consultation work for a company that was looking to sell some alien-themed educational software to the Middle East, denying life throughout the universe is likely outright un-Islamic.

I'm of the opinion that Mohammed (PBUH) was about as reliable as J. Smith, but he seems to have gotten this one broadly correct, as I rather doubt we're the only life in the universe. It's a topic for another time, but Islam and Mormonism actually have quite a bit in common in rough parallels, and I'm pretty amazed at the disparity in American attitudes toward the two groups.

In fact some of the cosmic specifics of Islam begin to make Scientology look positively sane:

http://www.speed-light.info/islam_life_other_planets.htm

There are some less strict (and these days less popular) schools of Islamic thought which revere all organized religious scripture as having some validity as revealed prophecy. It's a vague sort of ecumenism. It's worth noting that pretty much every school of Islamic teaching regards everyone to be a natural Muslim by default, having been in some cases led astray by religious teachers who are confused or just plain bad. Animals are assumed to be Muslim, which I guess is a pretty good attitude to have for sleeping soundly going into the Eid sacrifice. Not sure how the animals feel about this.

Putting it all together, AA could likely run with some success in Islamic societies with minimal to no editing for content. Certainly my experiences in the region showed people to be very open to a world filled with djinn, angels and other creatures, and/or aliens visiting this planet.

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Mark L

2/14/2013 05:28:00 am

I was watching this, and the difference between it and the first season (which I'm also watching with my wife, from time to time) is pretty large. Back then, they actually tried to use evidence to back themselves up - wrong evidence, and flat out lies in some cases, but evidence nontheless.

Now, we get into season 5 and the air of "wow, do we still have to do this?" is everywhere. Childress said something, and the look on his face almost screamed "I don't believe a word of this, and if literally anyone at this moment calls me on it I'm giving it all up". Like he couldn't believe he was getting away with just dreaming stuff up.

But you're right, Jason, about how their central thesis (such as they could be said to have one) is now firmly in the realms of aliens as gods. They've been forced to back into a corner thanks to people like you, though.

"I’m not sure that either Jews or Christians would agree with the assertion that Jesus was a prophet of God." We Christian believe the "Prophet like unto Moses" is among the Prophecies that refer to Yeshua.

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.